Our Top New Feature Releases in 2024

As we’re reflecting on 2024, we’re excited about the improvements we’ve made to better serve you. 

Here are our top new features from 2024:

Financial Protection & Privacy

One of our biggest priorities in 2024 was improving your ability to protect your revenue from chargeback offenders and scalpers. We also replaced your name and email on your event’s marketing page with a contact form to protect your personal information.

Chargeback Blocker

With the chargeback blocker, you can prevent repeat offenders and scalpers from purchasing tickets or registering for your event in the future. Our system uses multiple identity markers for enhanced protection from future abuse. We also block offenders that we’ve seen across multiple clients from making any future purchases through our site, which offers you additional protection.

While we technically released this feature at the end of 2023, 2024 was the year we were able to see its effectiveness fully. 

The Cowtown Rodeo was able to cut its chargebacks nearly in half – from $14,000+ in 2023 to $8,147 in 2024.

The Tucson Rodeo experienced even more success – reducing its year over year chargebacks by 98 percent. Chargebacks for the Tucson Rodeo went from $23,000+ in 2023 to $449 in 2024.

To get the most success from the chargeback blocker, review your sales reports weekly to catch bad actors faster and stop them sooner.

Learn more strategies for combating scalpers and chargebacks: "3 Ways to Stop Scalpers In Their Tracks".

Option to Add reCAPTCHA Verification

We’ve added further security to your online order processes – registration, tickets, product sales, sponsors, and donations – by allowing the option to include reCAPTCHA verification. Turn this setting on by navigating to “Event Administration”, then “Edit Event.”

Emails on Marketing Page changed to Contact Form

We used to list your name and email address as contact information on your event’s marketing page. To protect your personal information better, we’ve replaced that information with a contact form. The contact form will be sent to the email address you provided for event contact information.

POS

We’ve also worked to improve our capabilities in our POS software by adding a kiosk mode and a change calculator for cash transactions.

Self-Checkout Kiosks

You can now set-up tablets to work as a self-checkout kiosk. Setting up kiosks can help you shorten lines at the box office the day of your event. Kiosks process card transactions with a connected card reader.

Change Calculator for Cash Transactions

To improve your box office experience, you can now use an integrated calculator to calculate change at the box office for cash transactions.

Growth Tools

We’re always looking for ways to help you sell more tickets and registrations so you can grow your event with ease and track the effectiveness of each effort. We’ve added two new growth tools this year:

Display Advertising

We offer ad placement on several of our pages – the home page, calendar pages, and state calendar pages. There’s only one ad placed per page, so you won’t be competing against other ads once you’ve purchased an ad.

You’ll track the impressions, clicks, and purchases that come from each ad you place.

Loyalty Program

You can now set-up and track your loyalty program through our software. You’ll set discounts by number of years participated and which years people have come. You’ll set the discount amount and expiration date.

Then, you’ll customize your email message and send it out. All of the qualifying participants will get a unique discount code to use to sign up for next year. And, you’ll be able to track the redemption rates to get a better sense of your retention.

Communication

Communication and messaging with your attendees and participants is key to a successful event. We’ve improved the ways you can communicate with attendees and participants in several ways:

Email Settings

Adjust your email settings to include your event logo, social media links, and sponsor logos in all of your emails. These settings make it easier to have consistency across your emails and easier to offer more value to your sponsors.

Email Templates

Add flair to your emails with customizable template designs that help make your emails pop.

Post-Event Survey Form

Get direct feedback from attendees and participants to understand what went well at your event, where you can improve, and other things your audience wants. Start with our standard questions and add your own to get the information you need. You can even include a promo code to encourage people who complete the survey to come again.

You can view and download the data from your survey for analysis. Gathering this information is key to improving your event year after year and keeping your audience coming back for more.

Ticketing

We’ve made a lot of big improvements to our ticketing system this year. These changes help you fight scalping and make it easier to set up your pricing.

Ticket Resale Capability

You can opt to allow ticket reselling for your rodeo from your online ticketing page. You’ll set the price floors and ceilings, which gives you more control over your ticket resale market. This capability can also be as part of a strategy to combat scalping.

Restrict Orphan Seats

It can be harder to sell out when you have a lot of orphan seats or single seats. You can turn on our setting that restricts orphan seats, which prevents orders that create unnecessary orphan seats. People placing an order will get a message to choose other seats before they can continue to pay for tickets.

Order Limits

You can also set ticket limits for orders. These limits can be set by event or by cart overall. You can also limit the number of bundles someone can buy in an order.

These limits are another way to combat chargebacks and scalping since it limits your per order exposure and requires bad actors to complete multiple orders.

Improvements to Ticket Pricing Set-up

It’s now much easier to set up pricing for tickets. You can easily create pricing groups, assign prices by event time, section, venue, and even individual seats.

Evaluate your pricing strategies to improve sales: "Increase Ticket Sales: Best Pricing Strategies and Tactics".

Customize Colors for Ticket Pricing Groups

You can also customize colors on your seat map to indicate pricing groups, accessible seating, and reserved seating.

Products & Registration

We’ve also made updates to Registration features and Products. 

Before we go further, “Products” used to be called “Merchandise.” We changed the name to make it more intuitive that both event merchandise and concessions could be sold through this feature.

Shipping Discounts on Products

You can now offer discounts on shipping when people buy multiple products from you online. Since shipping costs don’t necessarily increase with multiple items, offering these discounts helps your customers save some money and can help encourage larger merchandise orders.

Update to Manage Repeat Deferrals

It’s now easier to manage repeat deferrals if you allow multiple deferrals. When the setting is turned on, our system counts original registration cost plus anything paid to cover the difference in registration pricing.

For example, if the original registration paid was $80, but to transfer or defer the registration cost difference was $10. If that participant defers again, our system counts the total $90 instead of just the most recently paid $10. Transfer or deferal fees are not counted towards the credit.

Improvements to Transfers, Deferrals, and Self-Edits Settings

We updated the view of transfer and deferral settings to make it easier to manage settings for transfers, deferrals, and self-edits.